That Butler, New Face

That Butler, Nurturing 2

After collecting everything she thought she might, Chêne was back at the townhouse and hard at work on reinventing the EpiPen for Ciel. She had a couple of ampules of sheep's adrenaline (which is what they had used before they figured out how to synthesize it in a laboratory) safely tucked away in the kitchen's refrigerator unit, so now all she had to do was finish working out the kinks in her design for the auto-injector. Theoretically, it should work just the same as a modern Epipen, but without modern plastics readily available for her use, she was going to have to improvise, and the device was probably going to end up being considerably more fragile since she would have to use a glass syringe... They would just have to be careful not to knock it around too much.

"Hm?" she said, puzzled, when she suddenly felt a wave of intense sleepiness wash over her. She knew what that meant. This often happened just before she had one of her vision dreams, but she needed to finish this for Ciel. Chêne struggled to stay awake, but she was fighting a losing battle. Eventually her eyes closed, and her head hit the desk with a thud. She was out like a light.

≈Dream Mode≈

There was a stately manor blanketed with snow. It felt neglected and empty from the outside. The windows that could be seen from the front were all dark, and no one had even bothered to shovel the walkways clear of snow. Its unkempt state was a far cry from the elegant and well cared for Phantomhive manor.

Then, suddenly, there was complete darkness, and she found herself inside of a sparsely illuminated room that was filled with piles of what appeared to be the discarded parts of life-sized porcelain dolls. They were beautifully crafted, but something about them sent a foreboding chill up Chêne's spine.

And then came the fire...

"!" Chêne exclaimed when she found herself facing several cages full children, all around Ciel's age and younger. They stared up at her with dull, listless eyes as the flames engulfed their surroundings. The heat was oppressive. They were trapped, trapped inside a raging inferno. None of them panicked or cried or tried to escape. They seemed completely unaware of what was happening around them, as though they had been drugged, or... or something so terrible had happened to them, that they had turned their minds inwards in an attempt to protect and shield themselves from the terrible reality of the outside world... They seemed incapable of feeling anything anymore, as though all that was left of them were empty shells...

Until the flames reached them.

When the first child felt the flames licking his feet, his lifeless eyes suddenly widened, and he fell to the floor of the cage, screaming and writhing in complete and utter agony.

Chêne felt her own eyes widen in horror as she watched the flames spread from one child to the next before she even had time to blink. She turned to glance at the rest of the room, desperate to find something she could use to free them. What she saw made her blood run cold.

There, in the middle of the amphitheater, was an altar... and it had been placed in the center of pentagram, a demon summoning seal... Just like the one from three years ago. It was the exact same room.

Chêne shook her head in denial as she took a step back. No... it couldn't be... not here!!

"AAAAAAGHHHHHH!!" The heart-wrenching screams of the children jarred her back to reality.

"Don't worry, I'll get you out of there! I'll save you!!" she cried reaching out to them despite the flames. "I'll save..." The words died in her throat when the child's hand turned to ash and crumbled in her hands.